Why experts say you should 'leave the leaves' this fall

If you have leaf raking on your weekend chore list, Lauren Eaton has good news for you. You can throw that rake away. Well, don't throw it away. Just put it aside for a little bit because it can do more harm than good to the environment. Lauren Eaton, Friends of the Rouge, welcome. Thanks so much. And I think so many people out there are like, please tell me why I don't have to rake my leaves. Yeah, save you some chores. It'll be great. So this is very environmentally friendly to leave your leaves. That's the message today. It is. We're doing a big push for Leave the Leaves. And so we have our little house here. This bunny household is doing wonderful things to protect their lawn. So we really promote leaving the leaves on your yard. It creates mulch. It eventually breaks down, so it helps enrich the soil. It also provides a lot of habitat for our pollinators, such as, you know, insects and pollinators, such as a moth can live in the leaves. Many different types of bees can live in the leaves. Do you like fireflies? Absolutely. So fireflies, a lot of their life cycle is actually underneath the ground in and amongst the leaves. So you're doing a lot to provide habitat for things that live on your lawn that need that habitat by leaving the leaves. And you keep all of the different, what do I want to say here, the landfills and everything clear from all of this. Exactly. So a lot of the times, organic matter such as leaves in the landfill can ultimately break down and cause a lot of gases that can be bad for the environment as well. And so, you know, they're made to be outside. They're made to decompose on their own. And so, yeah, you can just leave them in your yard. We really promote also leaving them intact instead of kind of breaking them up with your lawnmower because that could potentially kill some of the bugs and you know organisms that are already in the leaves so please leave them intact and then if you don't want your leaves completely covered or your yard completely covered in leaves you could create a little space in your yard maybe in your backyard kind of back by the shed to have a pile of leaves that you leave there for the pollinators and the it's not only pollinators It's little amphibians as well. So we do a frog and toad program, and we care a lot about our local frog friends. And so the frogs can find habitat and live under the leaves as well. And so you can create spaces in your yard, basically, for the leaves. That's an important message, too, because if you have an HOA, they want you to keep a clean yard or something like that, or you just want a clean lawn, just find a dedicated space for them. Exactly. Yep, like I said, it could be in the backyard, back by the shed. If you have an unused area of your yard, it could be in the garden beds themselves. You know, a lot of the times you don't have flowers year-round into the wintertime, so you could put the leaves in your garden beds or some of your landscaped areas, and they break down naturally and provide free mulch. They provide nutrients to your soil, so it ultimately benefits your yard and your ecosystem. Don't burn them either. Don't burn them. So a lot of folks like to burn their leaves, and it can release a lot of gases, fine particulate matter if you're sensitive to if you have asthma or you know have some respiratory issues that could make it worse so just leave them in your yard it's easy it is and it takes a task away that might be annoying for so many people so it's good news talk to me about what's happening right now in the fall season with friends of the rouge i mean there's always something going on we have so many things happening so i work in the monitoring department and that's getting in the river looking at bugs fish frogs we just had our our annual benthic macroinvertebrate survey last fall. So we collect a lot of bugs that live in the water that also benefit from having the leaves kept from the stream because they can break down and remove some of the oxygen from the water. So it's good to have lots of oxygen for the fish and frogs. So we'll be looking through all of our bugs and seeing what lives in the stream. We also have a paddling event this Saturday is our haunted paddle. That's going to be really exciting. And then we also have a number of rain garden planting. So a lot of restoration happening. The little bunny household has a rain garden and a rain barrel in order to capture storm water so that it absorbs and releases more slowly into the river. Lauren Eaton, Friends of the Rouge, thanks so much for the message and thanks for getting me out of those chores this weekend. You don't have to ask me twice. Therouge.org is the website for more information, all the great events and things happening there. Thanks so much, Lauren. Thank you. Appreciate it.